Darkness
by alphadine
Summary: Very dark prequel to goddessofbirth's story 'Broken'.  "She was destruction. Never wanted to be like that, but couldn't have changed it either and it was time to let go before she'd annihilate everything that still meant something to her."


**Titel: **Darkness

**Pairing: **Hints of River/Jayne  
><strong>Rating: M<br>Disclaimer: **the usual: not mine, don't own, don't profit, yadda, yadda…

**WARNING: Extreme Angst, Suicide, Character Death! **If you think you can't stomach it, please, please don't read it!

**A/N: Thanks to the wonderful, generous and awesome goddessofbirth for giving her permission to mess around in her 'Broken Verse'. And to top it she also did me the honor of beta reading this piece. (Isn't she just **_**fuckawesome**_**?)**

I know there are happier places to play but this gorramn Angst!bunny just didn't leave me alone.

**-.-.-.-.-.-.-**

Darkness

She sat on the floor of the cargo bay, cradling the gun she had sneaked from his bunk. He'd been too drunk to notice, his wife too concerned about him to care, either.

She lifted the weapon to her face, caressing the metal with her cheek, smelling the gun-oil he used to clean it with, smelling him.

She knew he cared about her, even if he didn't show it. It wasn't the same way he cared about his wife or his guns though; it was different, complicated, like she was.

There had been a time when he'd followed her every move. Suspicious at first, angered and annoyed, seeing her just as some scrawny crazy brat with nothing to desire on her - except maybe the big bounty on her head.

But things had shifted, like her body had as she had grown some more womanly curves. His perception of her had changed.

The looks he'd thrown at her then hadn't been suspicious anymore. Something else had dominated them; something strange, old as time, primal. Something that had caused a strange tingle in her guts, like a gentle caress where his hands didn't dare to touch. She'd liked that feeling.

But all of a sudden these looks had stopped again and she'd never gotten any explanation why. She suspected it had to do with the slow but steady increasing frequency of her fits. He'd probably finally realized that she had only half a brain and she thought the impossibility of any connection between them might have broken his heart in two.

She'd always wondered where this metaphor came from. Physically this was impossible, yet the comparison fit. River smiled bitterly at the weapon in her hand. Thankfully, he'd had at least the other half of his heart to live on. Her own heart - to stay with that comparison - had crumbled to tiny bits when he'd turned his attention away.

In the following time, he'd started to see Kaylee more often, and as much as it had secretly hurt her, she knew that it was only logical. Kaylee was a real woman, unlike her. She, River, was too destroyed by the Academy, too shattered to take care of herself.

Instead, it had been her brother who called the shots in her life, when her clear mind was absent, and there had been days she had hated him for it.

But then again, it was her brother who caught her if the confusion took over again. The one who kept her together, so she wouldn't get lost in the madness that had taken over her mind, more and more often with every year that passed. She should be thankful that he could put her into that somewhat peaceful state of floating with all his drugs and smoothers, when the terrifying pictures and voices her unsteady mind puts into her head had been too much to bear.

But in those less and less lucid moments she was painfully aware that it shouldn't be this way.

She was destroyed, and with that, she destroyed the people around her.

Slowly she lowered the gun to the floor and used her fingers to count.

One: her brother; Simon who had given up his career, his love and his own life. Everything. Simon should have been with Kaylee, but her brother was too tied up with keeping her, River's, life and her mind together in some way. He'd neglected the woman he loved and so he'd lost her.

Ironically, to the man that River had thought was meant for her own self.

She held up another finger.

Two: Kaylee.

The Mechanic deserved a man who could love her with his whole heart and not with one that was broken in two,. Broken because of an unpredictable Crazy. Kaylee should be able to be happy without distraction, but River had noticed those hard edges that had sneaked their way into Kaylee's once so radiant smile.

Over the course of time River had observed that Jayne's 'dates' with the bottle had upped proportionately with the number of her own 'dances' with madness. And Kaylee had noticed this connection, too, and although not jealous by nature, Jayne's wife had been worried. River never had wanted her to be worried.

Looking at her hand, River added another finger to the two she already held up.

Three: Jayne.

Thinking of him was the hardest. She swallowed hard to hold back the tears that threatened to well up.

Despite the sting it caused, she'd really hoped that things would go better for him when he finally decided to marry the bubbly mechanic. River had wanted them to get some peace. To be a happy couple. For him. For Kaylee. For herself, so the guilt of being the reason of his cracked heart wouldn't weigh so hard on her.

It took her some years - mental fits can be very distracting and meddle up the perception of timelines - until she finally realized how much he must have loved her then, and probably still did. And that, with her still being around him, and seeing her and her mind falling apart day by day, she was destroying him slowly, too.

He deserved to be happy, unfazed by worries about someone so insane like her. Everybody here on board, who lived and suffered under the spell of her progressing phrenesis, deserved to get some peace.

Deserved normality.

She was destruction. Never wanted to be like that, but couldn't have changed it either. Not then, anyway. She'd tried before but they hadn't let her.

But now she was here, alone. And maybe this was no coincidence either. Maybe it was meant to be that no one had noticed yet that she wasn't lying in her bed like she was supposed to be, drugged into dreamless unconsciousness. Or maybe they were just tired of being worried or afraid she might kill them all someday, during a fit. So they stopped watching her and instead waited like sheep for this to happen.

Picking up the gun again, she inhaled deeply the comforting and soothing smell of metal and gun-oil. It was him, always had been. His voice, his smell. And the one time he danced with her. Once. At his own wedding.

Those had been the only things, the only reasons that had bound her here, to reality. But it was time to let go before she'd annihilate everything that still meant something to her. Or had a meaning at all.

River shook her head to clear her mind as confusion started to take over again. She had to finish this before she was too muddled to think at all. She could have done this silently, with a knife or poison, but that would have taken too long to finish it for her taste. They would probably find her before and _save_ her again. And she was so tired of _being saved._

Besides, if the universe had started with a bang like they say and since her existence affected too many people she cared about, causing an imbalance in _their_ universe, it seemed just right if this was straightened out again with another _bang_.

She was certain that they, like the rest of the 'Verse, were better off without her, and she smiled when she held the gun under her chin and pulled the trigger.

It was her gift to them, and to herself, too: Freedom.


End file.
